MORE WAYS TO GET ENGAGED

StreamGlider, which we first covered here, made its debut yesterday. The iPad news and social reader application in its initial version debuts sans the location-aware and some of the more heavy-duty semantic topic stream smarts discussed in that piece, but newly named StreamGlider Inc. CEO Bill McDaniel – also CEO of SemantiStar, which developed the application – says to expect them in updates beginning in March. McDaniel is partners in StreamGlider with co-founder Nova Spivack, also CEO of Bottlenose among other pursuits, and co-founder John Breslin, DERI researcher, NUI Galway lecturer, and founder of New Tech Post.

What’s in the current version that McDaniel says differentiates the software from other iPad news reader apps like Pulse and Flipboard are real-time news streams composed of mixed media – sources such as RSS, YouTube, Flickr, Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook – so you can see news items, images, video, social media updates and more about particular content of interest, any way you like in a stream. “You can put them all together in a single stream so you can build streams to be more topic-oriented,” McDaniel says.

The app also offers the novelty of providing different modes for viewing streams. It brings in the notion of a ticker approach to the news with its newsreader grid mode that flows information across the screen, automatically updating itself with breaking news related to a user’s particular streams; a slideshow, or what it calls “leanback” mode view, as a photo and news presenter; and a magazine mode where you can see your content streams in a magazine format and read the whole text of articles without jumping out to a browser. “It’s probably the first multiple model news app out there,” McDaniel says.

Users can share items using Facebook, Twitter or email with anyone, but they can also share their actual streams of curated content with other StreamGlider users. “We have the concept of being able to share the definition of a stream, not just the content necessarily, but how the stream is built, with other Streamglider users,” he says. “That’s a very unique feature. I don’t know of anyone else who thinks of defining some sort of channel like a TV channel about a topic and can share the channel definition, not just the stories themselves. That’s a big opportunity for adding more semantics.” Recipients of shared streams can change and restructure them as they like, to be as narrow or as wide a view on the channel as they wash.

One of the venture’s targets is to offer the technology as a private-label solution for publishers or any other organizations that wants either an internal or open content distribution system, barnded and customized to their ends.